Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Radicals, activists and 2012 US elections

October 25, 2012

The US society is at a crossroads. A massive debt, a
devalued dollar and the unchecked political and economic power of the banks
threaten the entire humanity as these financial aristocrats feed the fuel of
war to maintain their power. Two weeks before the election the US military and
the Israeli defense forces are carrying out largest-ever joint US-Israeli
military exercise in preparation for war against the people of Iran. In the
midst of this economic crisis, the worst since 1933, comes another electoral
contest. The election is itself being fought like a war with the air war, the
ground war and the war against women and the poor. According to Newt Gingrich,
formerly a candidate for the presidency from the Republican Party, this will be
the most important election in the United States since 1860.

On November 6 citizens of the United States will vote in national elections. By
law, these elections for the president of the United States are held every four
years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Since 1845, this has
been the day designated for holding presidential and congressional elections.
At the time when Congress made this decision, African Americans were enslaved.
They were excluded from this form of democracy by which a population chooses an
individual to hold public office. The elections of 1860 brought Abraham Lincoln
to the presidency and the Southern states (the Confederacy) seceded leading to
a massive war between the states. It was only after that war when Africans in
the United States were recognized as citizens and were allowed to vote after
the passing of the 14th amendment. This year, the contest is between the
sitting President, Barack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic Party, and Mitt
Romney, the candidate for the Republican Party. That Obama is a descendant of
Africans is of tremendous importance, but is no more important that the office
which he holds. Obama is the president of the United States and at the same
identified by the media as an African American.

This contradiction has posed real questions for radicals and activists inside
the United States. Aware of the contradiction between the history of
enslavement and the power of the office of the president, there are those from
the ranks of the anti-capitalist forces who have argued that it does not matter
who holds the office of the president. The argument from this section of the
progressives holds that the United States is an imperialist state that acts in
the interest of finance capital. One commentator from the ‘left’ even described
Obama as the more ‘effective evil.’ Other sections of the peace and justice
forces have worked consistently to oppose militarism abroad and to work for
social injustice at home. Out of the pedantic work of this section arose the
Occupy Wall Street movement that brought into clear focus the political power
and undemocratic nature of the top one per cent of the population.

The Republican Party has mobilized on the basis of overt racism. This racism
has taken many forms but the most brazen has been the numerous efforts to roll
back the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in order to disenfranchise millions of Black
and Latino voters. This unashamed reflex of white supremacy was best expressed
in the disrespect displayed by Mitt Romney towards Barack Obama during the
second debate. It is this contradiction of the disrespect and open racism of
the Republicans that calls for clarity from radicals and activists.

In our contribution this week we argue that all those who have the opportunity
to vote on November 6 must go out to vote to defeat the Romney candidacy. The
contradictions of the expanded militarism and drone strikes, unemployment,
underemployment, environmental degradation and the tenuous nature of the dollar
as the currency of world trade cannot be solved by the Democratic Party. The
challenge will be to defeat Romney while building a movement that is based on
reversing the priorities of the militarists so that the society can make a
break with the power of the financial aristocracy and the traditions of racial
genocide.

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

From every corner of the world there is interest in the forthcoming
presidential elections in the United States. As the corporate media pronounce
on the so-called surge of Mitt Romney and the possibility of his emergence as
the victor, so the concern rises in all parts of the world. This writer has
been called and contacted from friends and associates in Asia, Africa, Europe,
Latin America and the Caribbean. The question posed: Why is Romney winning?
There is fear that the belligerent pronouncements of Mitt Romney will take the
world back to the prolonged tensions of the cold war. In an earlier debate, Romney
had identified Russia as the number one political foe of the United States.
This statement by Romney and his open embrace of the Prime Minister of Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu had endeared him to the neo-conservative forces that had
launched the wars against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iran. One billionaire,
Sheldon Adleson, has contributed millions to the campaign of the Republican
Party and has promised to spend $100 million to defeat Barack Obama. Sheldon
Adleson, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh are not satisfied with
the covert war being waged against Iran and the drone strikes ordered by the
Obama administration. These militarists along with the Republican candidate are
stoking the fires of all out war. This militarism is consistent with those who
believe that a full scale war will pull the United States out of the
depression.

Oil companies, Wall Street bankers, journalists from the main stream and many
who pretended to be Liberals now vow that Obama must be a one term President.
Even the so-called liberal mayor of New York, the billionaire Bloomberg, has
organized his own super PAC to influence the election. Bloomberg’s rationale:
he wants to ensure that Elizabeth Warren does not win the Senate seat in
Massachusetts. Elizabeth Warren is a vigorous supporter of Consumer Protection
legislation to rein in the power of Wall Street bankers and billionaires such
as the Bloombergs.

Bob Woodward is another ‘liberal’ who has written a book which was to serve as
part of the campaign against the incumbent president. His book, ‘The Price of
Politics’, was launched to coincide with the last three months of the electoral
campaign. The principal argument of the book is that Barack Obama has been
indecisive and has not taken charge of the challenge of dealing with the debt
limit crisis and that Obama was as partisan and dogmatic as John Boehner,
Speaker of the House of Representative.

MOVING THE COUNTRY TO THE EXTREME RIGHT

Journalists from the print and electronic media such as Bob Woodward and Tom Brokaw
have been campaigning for Wall Street while appearing to be objective and
neutral. These commentators appealed to the mainstream of US society to remind
them that Obama did not come from the mainstream. These pundits were the more
sophisticated representatives of a tide in US politics that had been expressed
by the Tea Party. For one year, the reality of the economic pressures on the
youth and poor had given birth to the transnational Occupy Wall Street
Movement. These same pundits mocked the Occupy movement to charge that it was a
leaderless movement, when it was this character of self-organization that made
this movement a force to challenge the right wing turn of the Tea Party and
their corporate sponsors.

Up to the time of the first presidential debates in early October, the
pressures from the corporate media had been to push the society so far to the
conservative side of politics that whoever won the elections, the Wall Street
magnates would benefit. Despite spending nearly a billion dollars through
direct contributions to Romney and the Super PACs, the far right had become
disillusioned with Mitt Romney and planned to shift resources to Senate and
Congressional races so that if and when Obama won, his hands would be tied by
Congress. After the disappointing performance of Obama in the first debate, the
media began to write about the surge of Mitt Romney and pointed to his good
‘poll numbers.’ In this psychological warfare against the US citizens the
corporate media were in cahoots with the big spenders in the campaign. As long
as the race for the presidency appeared close, there would be millions spent on
advertising. The media had a vested interest in perpetrating the idea that
Romney was a possible winner. The advertising dollars provided a windfall for
TV stations all over the country.

The other area where there was broad agreement from a vast array of media
pundits was that four more years of having a black man in the White House was
dangerous. The crudest manifestation of this racist formulation had been
presented by the Tea party with posters saying ‘Take Back Our Country,’ and
‘Put the White Back in the White House.’ Newt Gingrich, one of the contestants
for the Republican Party (before he was defeated by Mitt Romney) had placed his
own stamp on this racist rhetoric by labeling Barack Obama the ‘first food
stamp president.’ Where Ronald Reagan had utilized the code words, ‘welfare
queens’ to disparage Black voters, the Tea Party fuelled the political power of
the conservatives in state legislatures all over the country who were working
to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voter ID legislation and other
impediments were invoked and challenged the Department of Justice. The fact
that the Obama team controlled the executive branch was one obstacle in this
massive effort to disenfranchise black and brown voters.

This drive at disenfranchisement is inspired by the long-term fear of the
Republican Party in relation to the demographic changes in the society. The
Latino population is the fastest growing section of the population and by 2016
the growth of this population will shift the dynamic of political power away
from the conservatives.

Mitt Romney supports the far right position on immigration and called for
Immigrants to self-deport, even while claiming that his father was an immigrant
who had been born in Mexico. After winning the Republican nomination, Romney
unveiled an ad that touted his immigrant roots. This was after taking a
hardcore anti-immigrant position during the primaries, vowing to veto the DREAM
Act – a measure that would give immigrants a path to legalization as long they
meet a strict set of criteria, including graduating from a US high school,
going to college or serving in the military and staying out of trouble with
police.

MORMONS – RACISM AND SEXISM

The ad, which touted Romney’s Mormon links, reminded voters of the deep racism
of the organization to which Romney belongs, the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. Mitt Romney is an elder in this religious organization and
up to 1978 black people were regarded as second-class citizens in this
organization. Brigham Young, one of the key architects of Mormonism in the
United States, had described black people as cursed with dark skin as
punishment for Cain’s murder of his brother. This ‘curse of Cain’ is held by
conservative racists all over the United States and had been mobilized as part
of the pro-slavery arguments. This same line of argument is carried to Africa
today by Christian fundamentalists who work in cahoots with the US military
that supports the US Africa Command.

Brigham Young had written in 1852 that: ‘Any man having one drop of the seed of
Cain in him cannot hold the priesthood.’ Young deemed black-white intermarriage
so sinful that he suggested that a man could atone for it only by having ‘his
head cut off’ and spilling ‘his blood upon the ground.’ Other Mormon leaders
convinced themselves that the pre-existent spirits of black people had sinned
in heaven by supporting Lucifer in his rebellion against God. From this line of
reasoning among the Mormons, one could then see that Barack Obama as a child of
an inter-racial relationship was the product of a sinful relationship.

From such a background it was not difficult to see Romney in actions when in
the second presidential debate he more or less told Barack Obama to be silent.
The sexism and racism of Romney was on clear display during the second
presidential debates when he was short and rude to the female moderator and
basically told Obama to wait his turn to speak. The only overt manifestation of
this racism that was missing was the words ‘shut up boy.’ Where the words were
missing, the body language and gestures of Mitt Romney spoke volumes to what
was going on in his head. The children of Romney, brought up in a household of
privilege, could not bear watching the debate and Tagg Romney, 42, confessed
during a radio interview that he felt like storming the stage and throwing a
punch at President Obama during the second debate on October 16. This disrespect
of Mitt Romney was so blatant that the mainstream media editorialized,

‘But you don't do that with a female moderator. It's problematic. Secondly, you
don't run over the president of the United States. Whether that president's a
Republican or whether that president is a Democrat. There are independent
voters who believe that a president should be treated with deference because he
is the commander-in-chief.”

THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN

For centuries, racism and sexism had held back the creative possibilities of
the United States. In this campaign, this racism and sexism has taken the form
of an unprecedented campaign against the rights of women. Throughout the world
of the Tea party there have been initiatives to criminalize abortion. The most
recent iteration of the debate on the rights of women took place this week when
a candidate for Senate in the State of Indiana, Richard E. Mourdock, said in a
Tuesday night debate that pregnancy is ‘something that God intended to happen’
even if it is the result of rape. This statement reinforced the opposition of
another conservative candidate in the state of Missouri, Tod Akin, who in
response to a question whether abortion should be permitted in the case of
incest or rape told a television station that,

‘It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare, if
it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole
thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think
there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist,
and not attacking the child.’

Both Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin forgot that rape is not a women’s issue,
but a crime issue. However, the conservatives who are against abortion among
white women are so strident that in the state of Virginia the conservative Tea
party leaders proposed a law that women seeking abortions in Virginia would
have to undergo an invasive ultrasound scan first - a move supposedly designed
to inform the women about the dangers of abortion.

These initiatives by the conservative forces have led to the view that this
election is also a war against women. In the words of David Plouffe,
potentially, abortion will be criminalized and women will be denied
contraceptive services.

This war against women has included the efforts to cut off funding for Planned
Parenthood, the aggressive anti abortion debates, the opposition to equal pay
for women. All of this was topped by the statement of Mitt Romney that when he
was Governor of Massachusetts he requested ‘binders full of women,’ in order to
find women who could serve in his government.

FISCAL CLIFF OR NATIONALIZING THE BANKS

It is on the question of the war and the economy where the voices of the left
are needed. The corporate media and the mainstream academics have been debating
the possibilities of a ‘fiscal cliff’ if the US government does not take
drastic measures to rein in the federal debt. Readers of Pambazuka will
remember that in 2011 during the debt ceiling debate, both Congress and the
presidency postponed real actions to deal with the US debt. The fiscal cliff
that is now in vogue refers to the fact that by January 2013, if no agreement
is reached, a variety of taxes, affecting all Americans, will increase
significantly on January 1. The government will begin to make deep cuts to
domestic and defense spending. Many economists from the conservative side argue
that increasing taxes on the rich will deepen the recession.

The ‘fiscal cliff’ is the formulation coined by the corporate media to
highlight a series of tax and fiscal measures now scheduled to take place
automatically on or just after January 1. These include:

The expiration of the Bush tax cuts first enacted in 2001 and extended in 2010
for two years. Taxes would rise across-the-board, both for low- and
middle-income families and the wealthy.

An across-the-board spending cuts, imposed by the debt-ceiling bill passed by
Congress and signed by Obama in August 2011, which begins to hit in January
2013, totaling $1 trillion over ten years.

The expiration of the payroll tax cut, enacted in December 2010 and extended
through 2012, which would amount to a 3.1 percent increase in taxes on every
American worker.

The expiration of extended unemployment benefits, adopted during the economic
slump that followed the 2008 crash.

The chief executives of 15 of the biggest US financial companies warned in a
letter to President Barack Obama and Congress that failure to head off the
‘fiscal cliff’ could lead to a sharp rise in interest rates, a downgrade of
America's credit rating and a recession. The letter was signed by 15 CEOs of
banks, brokerages and insurance companies and by the head of the Financial
Services Forum, the industry lobby. Among the signatories are Jamie Dimon, CEO
of JP Morgan Chase; Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs; Michael Corbat, the
newly installed CEO of Citibank; John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo; and Brian
Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he will
‘do whatever it takes’ to persuade Congress to find a way to prevent massive
spending cuts and tax increases from automatically taking effect at the
beginning of next year.

Goldman Sachs has made it clear that it wants to see the Obama administration
defeated.

This debate on the fiscal cliff and the intervention of the CEO’s was designed
to foreclose discussion on alternatives that would hold the financial barons
accountable.

These bankers have organized so that whoever occupies the White House after
January 1, the ‘austerity’ program of big capital will be implemented. The
corporate media and the bankers are pushing the society to accept a cut in
social services so that the government will cut Medicare, Medicaid and other
social programs. Language about ‘concrete steps to restore the United States’
long-term fiscal footing’ and ‘legislation that truly restores the nation’s
long-term fiscal soundness’ are designed to divert attention from the fact that
the top one per cent are the ones who have benefited from the financial crisis.

THE CHALLENGES FOR THE PEACE MOVEMENT

During the so-called foreign policy debate what was striking was the level of
unanimity among the two candidates. The US military is overstretched. There are
overt and covert wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, Mali,
Libya, Somalia and Central Africa. This week the US military and the Israelis
have embarked on a major military exercise. Thus far, the peace movement and
the rank and file soldiers have been the main deterrent to full scale war
against Iran. This election is taking place when the triggers of open warfare
are great. Sections of the Republican Party have embarked on bashing China as a
prelude to the kind of propaganda that can lay the foundation for military
action. US military maneuvers in the South China Sea and the sablerattling of
sections of the US foreign policy establishment are meant to plunge the US into
war, regardless of who wins the election. There is no doubt that Mitt Romney
will be a willing ally of the militarists but Barack Obama can only resist the
militarists if there is a robust peace and justice movement

In every locality, individuals and local organizing committees have been
finding their own modest way to engage the process of raising questions that
are central to the concerns of the oppressed. It is from the ranks of the most
oppressed sections of the US population and from the prison reform movement as
a whole, where the links between militarism abroad and the prison industrial
complex have been made. It is this cross-section of the society that continues
to raise the question of the war, racism and sexism.

This writer is opposed to Mitt Romney and the Republicans. This opposition to
Romney does not mean a blanket endorsement of the alternative. The most
important task of the moment is to act against the further entrenchment of the
neo-conservative (some would say neo-fascist) forces. This writer is again
recalling the activism of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in another era.
Their campaign against slavery did not say to Abraham Lincoln that they were
against him. They campaigned to the point where their plan for ending slavery
precipitated a major split among the rulers.

The US is approaching a similar situation where the ruling class cannot rule in
the old ways. In my book on the 2008 electoral process, I called this a
revolutionary era.

THERE IS NO TIMETABLE FOR REVOLUTION

The elections in the US form one component of the struggles to advance peace,
environmental justice and health for all. The initiative is in the hands of
those who will mobilize to defeat Romney and to hold Obama accountable.

The mobilization for the elections must be part of a call for the creation of
the pre-conditions for organizing African Americans, women, oppressed immigrant
groups, gays and lesbians, Latino/Latina, First Nation peoples, poor whites,
the unemployed, and all peace loving peoples.